Rich-Club Organization of the Human Connectome

By Martijn P. van den Heuvel, Olaf Sporns. 2011

2,266 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The human brain is a complex network of interlinked regions. Recent studies have demonstrated the existence of a number of highly connected and highly central neocortical hub regions, regions that play a key role in global information integration between different parts of the network. The potential functional importance of these “brain hubs” is underscored by recent studies showing that disturbances of their structural and functional connectivity profile are linked to neuropathology. This study aims to map out both the subcortical and neocortical hubs of the brain and examine their mutual relationship, particularly their structural linkages. Here, we demonstrate that brain hubs form a so-called “rich club,” characterized by a tendency for high-degree nodes to be more densely connected among themselves than nodes of a lower degree, providing important information on the higher-level topology of the brain network. Whole-brain structural networks of 21 subjects were reconstructed using diffusion tensor imaging data. Examining the connectivity profile of these networks revealed a group of 12 strongly interconnected bihemispheric hub regions, comprising the precuneus, superior frontal and superior parietal cortex, as well as the subcortical hippocampus, putamen, and thalamus. Importantly, these hub regions were found to be more densely interconnected than would be expected based solely on their degree, together forming a rich club. We discuss the potential functional implications of the rich-club organization of the human connectome, particularly in light of its role in information integration and in conferring robustness to its structural core.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Cognitive Neuroscience

In Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

Citations in the corpus

Weight Agnostic Neural Networks (2019, methodology): “The connectome can be viewed as a graph [12, 42, 110], and analyzed using rich tools from graph theory, network science and computer simulation.”
The hubs of the human connectome are generally implicated in the anatomy of brain disorders (2014, background): “A third measure of centrality, related to both nodal degree and participation coefficient, is the elite clique of highly interconnected hub nodes that exists in networks with a high rich-club coefficient (van den Heuvel and Sporns, 2011).”
The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization (2017, positive): “…sensory and motor systems to create multi-sensory representations of the world at various time scales from the perspective of someone who has a body, all in the service of allostasis (for evidence consistent with this view, see van den Heuvel et al., 2012; van den Heuvel and Sporns, 2011, 2013).”
BrainNet Viewer: A Network Visualization Tool for Human Brain Connectomics (2013, background): “modularity [14,15], highly connected hubs [8,16] and ‘rich-club’ configurations [17,18].”
Cognitive relevance of the community structure of the human brain functional coactivation network (2013, background): “Several studies have confirmed that human brain networks have complex topological properties (3)—including small worldness; high-degree hub nodes; and a community structure that can be decomposed as a set of modules (4), or as a small rich club and a large periphery (5).”
Closures and Cavities in the Human Connectome (2016, background): “[63] Martijn P van den Heuvel and Olaf Sporns.”
Network-Level Structure-Function Relationships in Human Neocortex (2016, methodology): “To investigate the role of high-degree hubs on structural networks extracted using PLS, we first perform a rich club analysis (see Materials and Methods; van den Heuvel and Sporns 2011; van den Heuvel et al. 2012).”
Cliques and cavities in the human connectome (2016, methodology): “To recover the minimal cycle, we threshold the network at the density immediately preceding ρbirth, then perform a breadth-first search (Rubinov and Sporns 2010) for a path from one vertex to the other, taking all minimum length paths as solutions.”